Griffith's TBI leads to 'new path'

Dallas Griffiths was scheduled to speak at a fireside in St. George, Utah with his friend about the charity work they organized for Tonga. The day was a perfect for longboarding. The air had been cleaned by an overnight rain and the sun was breaking through the clouds.

Before leaving to go up to the top of Snow Canyon, the wife of the sandwich shop owner where he had lunch told him not to be late for the fireside.

“The only way I’ll be late is if I’m dead,” said Griffiths.

Griffiths, on his longboard, passed his friend and went around a corner that curved left where he was no longer visible. When his friend rounded the corner, he saw people, cars and bikes gathered around Griffiths who was unconscious and had blood coming out of his ears. He didn’t wear a helmet. No one knows what happened, and Griffiths doesn’t remember. He was 24 years old at the time.

After six weeks in a coma, Griffiths woke up to find that he couldn’t talk, eat, groom himself or move. He was a quadriplegic as the result of a traumatic brain injury (TBI).

“I knew how to speak,” says Griffiths. “I just had to retrain the coordinations of my muscles – my tongue.”

For “the longest month of my life,” Griffiths was on an all-solids diet because he didn’t know how to swallow. He had gotten his education in physical therapy and knew that if he worked hard he could get some or all of his ability to move back. He pushed himself beyond what his physical therapists asked.

Now 28, Griffiths is working with the Brain Injury Alliance of Utah as part of the AmeriCorps VISTA program. He cannot walk on gravel and says that it is hard for him to concentrate on one thing. He faces discrimination but says that it is just out of fear and ignorance. When he talks to people, that fear and the discrimination go away.

“I am one of the fortunate TBI survivors,” says Griffiths.

Even though TBI affects more people than AIDS, breast cancer, and prostate cancer, Griffiths had never heard of it before, and he felt like he was the only one who had experienced something like it.

“I would like to help other TBI survivors so they don’t have to go through the same thing I did,” says Griffiths, “that feeling of being so alone.”

He gives presentations to school children as part of his work at the Brain Injury Association of Utah and is responsible for reaching out to veterans and the Hispanic/Latino populations. While he misses being able to play sports, Griffiths says that the injury has given him “a new path.”

Griffiths is working on his Master’s degree at Westminster College in Community Leadership, which includes nonprofit management and is helping the Huntsman Cancer Institute Apartments create an online database to keep track of vacancies available for outpatients receiving cancer treatments. He is engaged to be married on January 13, 2011.

“You can do anything you put your mind to. The mind is so powerful,” says Griffiths.​This article was originally published on examiner.com. Links have been updated August 2016.